Well, gamers, what can we say; sometimes you just mess up. Yesterday, we published an article that betrayed all of our journalistic standards, a review that went against the very ideals that make OGN great. But after discovering the mistake, we are committed to making things right. That is why, after finding out we haven’t gotten so much as a dime out of Microsoft, we are officially retracting the glowing 9.3 score we gave to Gears 5.

We know that kind of haphazard, independent-minded journalism is not what people come to OGN for, and we profusely apologize.

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To think that we would give out such a positive review without cashing in at the same time is abhorrent. We normally have a strict editorial process that involves a close profit check, but somehow, this fell through the cracks. How would our readers feel after finding out we were big enough chumps to whiff on a giant payout like this? They would never trust us again. They deserve transparency in our reviews and criticism, and they need to know that when they see a 9+ score on our website, there was some serious fucking dough behind it.

There is no excuse, we just got sloppy. We saw all these Gears 5 banner ads and commercials and assumed we had secured our piece of the pie. Microsoft has deep pockets, and we never should have slept on this. We don’t give out 9s to every well-crafted and engaging game willy-nilly like some other publications. Our scores mean something, and that’s why they cost so much.

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Also, needless to say, the writer has been fired, executed, and his family was sent a bereavement package of Omaha Steaks. There will be no more mistakes.

Our readers deserve more than honest and incisive criticism. They deserve comfort, they deserve to bathe in the warm, enveloping gel of certainty and consumer confidence, to be told they made the right decisions, and, yes, you are happy now. Microsoft gives you what you want and we confirm it for you. That is the basis of video game journalism. That is the ecosystem that brings you simple, pure, unthinking joy and us cold-hard cash. We betrayed that yesterday, and for that, we are sorry.